Mel Cook

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.melcookart.com

City / State: Chicago, IL

My paintings feature humorous landscapes where representation is fetishized. Using a maximalist approach in paintings that slip between modes of representation, I address the process of responding to the spatial illusions of painting, materiality, and imagery. My work features warped spaces where figure and ground merge. Drawn lines help demarcate the slippage between what is and what might be, calling attention to the constructed setlike spaces. Using clichés as props, the work points to a larger cultural obsession with the idealization of the everyday and its link to the “feminine.”